To You I Present My Moofie-film.

My analysis of blip.tv.

Uses footage from Banteron's Blip Blog, HARDDISKEN COLOR beta, videoblogging-class and Beet.TV. Images belong to their respective sites and animations are done by James Woldhuis (Me!). Audio sample used in music from Shimoda's 'Bass Blip'.

How could one man be this awesome? I have been learning Motion recently and decided to mix my skill with animation in Flash with my (developing) skill with Motion. As I sat and wondered how to best present blip.tv, I decided that the best way to understand blip.tv is to see blip.tv. Those clips (the ones without me) we taken from Creative Common liscenced videos on blip.tv, so I think its a nice little quirk that they are then used to provide information on blip.tv. Who knows, maybe someone will download my video and make something out of THAT.

This isn't the first mashup of videos ever to be produced, but it is a creatively common mashup, with all videos attributed, which is rare. The audio is fairly heavily a beat created by Shimoda called 'Bass Blip' (I wonder how I found that?) which I then cunningly remixed epically by copy-pasting it a few times, duplicating the track and then changing some equalisers. The result is fairly similar until about 20 seconds in where it has a sort of 'leader-mirror' thing going on. If you don't understand what that is then don't worry I just made that up. Shame you wont hear it over that damnable dialogue. Oh and how I wish I had a microphone when it came to recording my voice. The sheer effort was excruciating (to your ears I'm sure). I had to send it through a conga-line of programs just to get its format where I could use it. I still cringe a little bit when it swaps from Dana and Banteron to my warbling demon-tone.

Gawd knows there is enough information (opinionated sure) about blip.tv on this page already, so I'll end it here.

Why Blip? Why Something About Blip?

Blip.tv is a marvellous video blogging service that once I was forced to use (by a very wise man) and grew to love for its many distinctions from other video hosting sites. I chose to diagram Blip.tv for the good of the masses and doing so expanded my own perception of what Blip.tv really accomplishes. My diagrams were created in what I now think is Adobe Flash simply for the ability to use layers and my love for vertex drawing over Paintshops. I made two drawings, with the second drawing being my focus of the exercise as the first was merely an overview of Blip.tv's features (the pathway of the second diagram can be traced through the larger diagram, but I had to separate them so it was clear what I was talking about). Why did I choose Blogger to host my work? I was already familiar with the service. It helped that my other blog, The Quite Finite Blog was also on Blogger and I simply adapted the visual style of that blog (minus the sidebar) to create this one. Do not think of this page as a blog however, but merely an article hosted on a blogging site. The old blog-man, in my title was also created in a primitive version of Flash kept on my Mac due to my laptop (and now desktop) PCs karking it.

My actual diagrams went through a few stages. First mapped out on paper, dragged into Flash there was just text and arrows. Then I made every a nice brown-y colour for whatever reason and spruced up the graphics. But text was boring, so I took the logos of every site Blip.tv connects to and put them in place. Finally with a clever Command+A, Command+C and Command+V a final layer behind created a darkened shadow effect (Command = Ctrl in hippy Mac land). It occurs to me that Macs have both a Command and a Control button... but only Command acts like Ctrl. Don't get me started on Alt/Option.

My diagram was definitely inspired by another similar diagram created for Flickr shown in class. Alas the link has since been buried somewhere in the feed and I cannot find it again. Elements I have borrowed into my diagram are headless arrows, where the arrows are really just elongated triangles. The small graphics I drew for uploading, downloading, embedding etc were created in flash to give the overall diagram a similar feel to the elusive diagram I first saw. I did not go overboard on graphics however as I felt that the inclusion of logos for all external sites was visually interesting enough. Another feature to note was how Videos overlap with Channels who overlap with Users, to reinforce that the Channel is a part of the User and similarly Videos are a part of the Channel. The small 'Blog' attachment to the side of Channel is because all Channels have (or can have) a written post portion.

My diagram sort of represents a flow chart of sorts, not with Yes/No but with actions and information. You start as a visitor. You can log in. You can go straight to videos. All paths in my diagram end with embedding, downloading or exporting to another site, but that is not necessarily the end of the flow. I know there are gaps and arrows missing, were it a real flow-chart, but for me to flow-chart an entire website would see every arrow touching every block. For simplicity's I did not draw that (like I could). Enjoy the following diagrams and associated wall of supporting text (Yum).

Let's Look at Blip.tv

Blip.tv is a web service which allows users to upload videos to create a video-blog known as a channel. It bears similarities to other popular services such as YouTube but boasts a few special features to make it stand out. Below is an overview of Blip.tv’s site functionality and compatibility with other web services.

To help better display the flow of a typical user; a simpler diagram has been provided below. It diagrams a sample situation involving signing up to Blip.tv to upload a video to then display on their Blogger page. There are other routes that could occur in this process which are coloured in gray. I will compare below the diagram the same method accomplished (or not) on YouTube and compare the services and reasons.

For this example: I have a video, on my hard drive. I want to have it on my Blogger blog.

A problem with creating a user on Blip.tv is that you must also create a channel with every user. This channel works like a video blog, with option for a written blog and each video as the next ‘episode’ in your ‘channel’. This is great if you want to create a video log, but is awkward if you only intend to upload a few standalone videos. Creating a channel when you create a user is unnecessary if you only intend to comment, etc. You cannot edit the name or address of the channel once you create it, so you must create a new user with a different email address if you want to start a new channel.

Starting a serious channel can be used to make profit on Blip.tv also. It is a requirement of sign up that all work you upload is original and you may assign creative commons licences so others may distribute your work. Advertisements are an option on Blip.tv and you may link Blip.tv to your PayPal account so for every advertisement shown or clicked you receive a portion of the revenue. Creating a highly popular channel could be profitable.

Despite a few good features there is not a lot of user interactivity on Blip.tv. Apart from comments on individual videos (you must go to the episode page as you cannot comment from the channel where you may watch from) there is no ‘friends/contacts’ or ‘favourites’ options for keeping track of other users on site as you would see on YouTube . You may (through an overly complicated process) create a playlist of videos you have watched, but it is awkward to set up and you must go to the episode page to add them and may only delete them from deep inside your user dashboard (the preferences page). Again YouTube handles this much easier, allowing you to add videos before you watch them to a ‘quicklist’ (you don’t even need to sign-in as it saves it to cookies).

An odd choice, Blip.tv only allows users to comment, but every comment demands an image-word verification that apparently only a human can complete. Creating a user however does not need this verification. YouTube does not require tedious verification for comments but asks once for verification upon sign-up. YouTube can also use your existing Google account as a log in, although it demands personal information such as location, DoB and gender. An improvement that would benefit Blip.tv is that instead of simply linking accounts for Blip.tv to Facebook and Flickr to allow the same account to access all three services. This however is impossible due to Flickr already being a part of the Yahoo network. However interestingly Blip.tv supports an option to send all uploaded videos to Yahoo Video among many other services shown in the diagram at the beginning of this document.

Comparing video uploading between the services Blip.tv and YouTube, both have interesting options. Blip.tv has options to upload video thumbnails (where YouTube pre-generates an image) and many methods of uploading video (such as from mobile, FTP or a desktop application called UpperBlip. Blip.tv offers a speedy upload that can take many formats, then after you have uploaded and are free to leave Blip.tv from your browser, the file is converted to flash for the player. YouTube offers multiple uploads at once, but it’s variety of formats is smaller (my .mov video I used to test Blip.tv failed when tried onYouTube and only ‘unknown’ reason was given).

There are a few ways of embedding video depending on your blog using Blip.tv. If your blog is supported, you may add uploaded videos to your blog feed, or for the case of Flickr, Facebook or Twitter; Blip.tv may automatically create a new post with the video/link/thumbnail. If you are not the owner of the video or only want a single video, you may embed the video into any posting service that supports HTML and embedding. You may also freely download any video on Blip.tv. YouTube however owns any video posted to their site and only offers embedding. There is never any watermarking on videos uploaded to Blip.tv.

To sum up: Blip.tv is a much younger service than YouTube. It isn't even out of beta stages yet. It has two apparent goals that separate it from YouTube. Firstly that it is a video blogging service targeted to an internet-mature community, secondly that all videos are owned by the user who uploaded them and is supportive of creative commons rights.

All logos are owned by their respective companies; all research is original.
Diagrams created by James Woldhuis.